As I have mentioned, I get a lot of my stuff from a recycle depot,
Resource rescue, One of the things that always catches my eye is the sample books for fabrics. The little swatches in a myriad of colours ar very hard to resist......
..so as you can see, I have a lot of them! This is the third time I have put this collage together. The first time, I got sidetracked and the cat walked all over it and messed it up. The second time I had a lot of trouble keeping the bits where I wanted them. This time I was prepared.
I used this spray on fusible web to stick them down. I found that the spray was a little bit tacky, even before the fusing with the iron, so I got all my coloured pieces down easily. There was chiffon, organza, silk, satin, velvet and lots of textures.
This is how it looked when they were all down. I covered it with some fine black bridal tulle to make my free motion stitching easier, later.
Originally, the idea was just an abstract one,perhaps representing the sun, but the more I looked at it, the more I saw a flower. A pink flower with a big yellow centre, so I decided to do some free motion to make it into a flower.
Here it is under the machine I use for thread painting (as you can see, there is no presser foot - I have adapted this machine to use no foot as I find it much easier to thread paint and sketch this way. However I do not recommend this to any one, it is just the way I work).
And here is a close up of the pebble stitch I am doing in the yellow centre with my favourite gold thread again (well, it was on the machine, so...) Obviously I will have to change my colour when I move to the petals and the background, but that is for another day.
My main problem as an artist is that I have too many ideas. (And some say too many UFOs) I find that if I concentrate on finishing everything, then I get nothing done, because it all becomes a chore, which dampens down the creativity quite a bit. I have to keep the ideas flowing and sometimes it takes me a while to get back to a piece. 80 or 90% of the time, I do get back to the piece, after a time and mostly it is when I get a new idea or a 'what if' that adds to the piece. That is true of this collage, which was sitting in my 'current' pile for quite a while until I thought of the 606 spray I am sure Van Gogh didn't finish everything he started, in fact historians know that he and other artists repainted their canvasses as the muse took them. Anyhow, that's my stuff for today.
Here are a few of the leaves I will be putting into my fabric book from yesterday. I will have at least a few pages for you sometime next week.
Happy creating!
